journal of the
National Institute for Career
Education and Counselling
March 2013, Issue 30
Contents
GUIDELINES FOR CONTRIBUTORS
Manuscripts are welcomed focusing on any form of
scholarship that can be related to the NICEC Statement.
This could include, but is not confined to, papers focused
on policy, theory-building, professional ethics, values,
reflexivity, innovative practice, management issues and/or
empirical research. Articles for the journal should be
accessible and stimulating to an interested and wide
readership across all areas of career development work.
Innovative, analytical and/or evaluative contributions from
both experienced contributors and first-time writers are
welcomed. Main articles should normally be 3,000 to 3,500
words in length and should be submitted to one of the coeditors by email. Articles longer than 3,500 words can also
be accepted by agreement. Shorter papers, opinion pieces
or letters are also welcomed for the occasional ‘debate’
section. Please contact either Phil McCash or Hazel Reid
prior to submission to discuss the appropriateness of the
proposed article and to receive a copy of the NICEC style
guidelines. Final decisions on inclusion are made following
full manuscript submission and a process of open peer
review.
SUBSCRIPTION AND MEMBERSHIP
The journal is published twice a year (cover price £20/issue)
and can be purchased via an annual subscription (£35 UK
or £50 overseas, including postage).
Membership of NICEC is also open to any individual with
an interest in career development (£100 per annum).
Members receive the journal, free attendance at all NICEC
events and access to publications and seminar materials via
the NICEC website. Individuals from one organization can
share their membership place at events.
For information on journal subscription or membership,
please contact Wendy Hirsh: membership@nicec.org
COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER
Articles are accepted on the condition that authors
assign copyright or licence the publication rights in their
articles to the National Institute for Career Education and
Counselling (NICEC). An important goal of NICEC is to
encourage freedom of expression. Individual viewpoints
expressed in the journal do not represent NICEC as a
whole.
EDITORIAL
2
New perspectives on career coaching
Phil McCash
ARTICLES
3
The changing shape of the career profession
in the UK
Charles Jackson
13
Career coaching in private practice –
a personal view
Denise Taylor
19
Lost in translation: career coaching deaf
students
Lynne Barnes and Elizabeth F. Bradley
26
Careers guidance and career coaching –
what’s the big idea?
Bill Law
33
Developing sustainable career coaching in
the workplace
Rob Nathan and Wendy Hirsh
39
The education and training of career
coaches: a psychological model
Janet Sheath
46
A positive approach to career coaching
Julia Yates
54
Creating career coaching
Gill Frigerio and Phil McCash
PUBLISHER
The Journal of the National Institute for Career Education
and Counselling is published by: National Institute for
Career Education and Counselling (NICEC), 1 Croft Road,
Godalming, Surrey, GU7 1BS.
www.nicec.org
NEWS
59
Programme of NICEC events 2013
60
Call for papers
March 2013, Issue 30
|1
Editorial
New perspectives on career coaching
This edition contains the latest thinking on career
coaching. It features the results of a recent survey and
papers focused on practice in public and private sector
contexts. There are also new conceptual pieces and
contributions from course providers outlining their
distinctive approaches. In short, this edition is essential
reading for anyone connected with this growing and
exciting field.
Charles Jackson discusses a recent survey on the
changing shape of the career profession in the UK. The
similarities and differences between work in the public
and private sectors are explored and implications for
the careers profession discussed.
Denise Taylor offers a personal view of career
coaching in private practice. She discusses the
development of a working relationship and the use of
assessments and other exercises. Client examples are
included to show the results of this career coaching
process.
Julia Yates argues for an approach to career coaching
based on positive psychology. She argues that this
approach has led to the rigorous application of
scientific methods to generate empirical evidence
and explores how positive psychology can inform and
enhance career coaching interventions.
Gill Frigerio and I propose that the design of career
coaching should be linked skilfully to career-related
learning, career literacy, contracting and calling. Overall,
a view of career coaching as a creative and critical art
is foregrounded.
Phil McCash, Editor
Lynne Barnes and Elizabeth F. Bradley discuss
their work with Deaf students in the higher education
sector. A case study is developed focusing on the
development of employability skills with this client
group.
Bill Law discusses the different vocabulary used in
careers work and poses the question ‘Where’s the
big idea?’ Among his answers are a more developed
programme of education, a need for critical thinking
and a move to conceptualising careers work as a
feature of civil society.
Rob Nathan in conversation with Wendy Hirsh
discusses developing sustainable career coaching in
the workplace. They look at some of issues in working
with employers and explore the theories that inform
Rob’s practice.
Janet Sheath discusses the education and training of
career coaches and proposes a psychological model.
The model identifies a spectrum of activities within
which career coaches work and the skills needed.
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Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling
Articles
Creating career coaching
Gill Frigerio and Phil McCash
In this article, a series of general propositions are
made concerning the nature and purpose of career
coaching. These statements are designed in response
to debates within the formal and informal literature
and to flesh out the authors’ distinctive approach to
career coaching. The activities and settings in which
career coaching can take place are described and it is
proposed that the design of career coaching should
be linked to career-related learning, career literacy
and contracting. The importance of calling and career
development is highlighted and a critical understanding
of opportunity systems encouraged. Overall, a view
of career coaching as a creative art is foregrounded.
Constructive engagement with the wider community is
welcomed in order to discuss and debate these claims.
Introduction
Between 2010 and 2012, we undertook an exploratory
literature review as part of our preliminary work
for developing a new Master’s degree in Career
Development and Coaching Studies. It became
increasingly clear to us that there was some ambiguity
and confusion about the use of the terms career
guidance, career education and career coaching. To a
large extent this ambiguity was also present within the
professional communities. We therefore developed a
set of detailed statements in order to clarify our own
position. These statements are reproduced here in
order to stimulate debate and discussion about the
nature and purpose of career coaching.
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The activities of career
coaching
We take an integrative approach to the activities of
career coaching. By this we mean that it includes a
wide range of activities including informing, listening,
advising, modelling, assessing, enabling, facilitating
and feeding back. These can take place through
one-to-one interactions or group working and in
on- and off-line contexts. Further enabling activities
include networking, advocating, peer training and
systems change. Career coaching is relevant to all
ages and stages of career development and involves
understanding the career development of others
as well as oneself. It can entail exploration of past
experiences as well as discussion of the future. A range
of career-related roles and interests may be addressed
beyond the tasks of paid work. It may involve a single
interaction, such as a one-to-one discussion or group
work, or a longer term series of interactions over a
period of months or years.
Career coaching settings
We reject the idea that career coaching is purely
for a particular group of people such as individuals
employed in high status jobs in mid-career. Career
coaching can take place in a wide variety of settings
including the public and private sectors, small and
large organisations and community contexts. It can
take place at board level and on the shop floor and
occur within the context of existing work or personal
relationships. Within organisations, given the breadth of
career coaching activities we identify above, coaching
and mentoring schemes and other activities of
employee training and development can include career
coaching.
Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling
Gill Frigerio and Phil McCash
Serendipitously perhaps, the words ‘career’ and
‘coaching’ appear to share some meanings in terms
of word history although their precise lineage is quite
separate. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
career is derived from the Latin carrus meaning
carriage or wagon and via carraria meaning carriageway
(2002). It was particularly in the nineteenth century
that career came to mean a person’s course through
life or part of a life. Coaching is derived from the
Magyar kocsi meaning a large carriage or wagon. In the
nineteenth century, coaching began to mean helping
a person with his or her educational course and later
this was extended to sporting activities.
Career and coaching appear to be linked therefore by
the words carriage and course. This suggests to us that
career coaching can be concerned with the vehicles
used for our projects and goals. These vehicles are
enabled and constrained by the availability of suitable
routes and roads. This connects with the sense of
career as a course or learning journey. It also highlights
the social dimensions of career coaching. It is possible
to design and build one’s own vehicle and route system
but generally we use vehicles and pathways built by
others that vary in size, function, cost and availability.
Following on from this, we propose that the careers of
the coach, the client and others are interlinked. Career
coaching is inevitably a social process as all parties are
always ‘in’ the process of career development.
The above discussion foregrounds the role of language
in both enabling and constraining how career coaching
can be discussed. Career and coach are terms that
come to us already storied. It is from this matrix of
prior meanings that alternatives may be fashioned.
This can also applied more widely. As people in
career development, we are also always already storied.
We exist within a network of prior meanings and
experiences and are sometimes able to recast these.
Consequently, we argue that our work is a creative art
i.e. that career and coaching are always in the process
of being creatively re-imagined and re-interpreted by
both ourselves and our clients.
Career-related learning
We propose that the design of career coaching
centres on career-related learning. In taking this position,
we have been influenced by the work of Patton and
McMahon (1998) on career development learning. We
see all the activities of career coaching listed above
as fundamentally educative. Education, both formal and
informal, is being interpreted here as the meta-activity
of career coaching. The strategic goal is to facilitate
career development through learning. This demands
a disciplined knowledge and use of learning theories
in order to design career development learning
experiences in relation to the many activities of career
coaching. For example, it is not sufficient to simply
administer a psychometric assessment, deliver career
information or engage in a one-to-one discussion, the
career coach must design each activity to facilitate the
client’s further career-related learning.
Articles
Career coaching and word
history
Relationship with career
studies
Career coaching is a specialised area of career
studies. This is a transdisciplinary field of knowledge
that has emerged formally over the last 100 years
and continues to evolve (e.g. Weber 1908/1970; Shaw
1930/1966; Hughes 1937/1958; Becker 1963/1966;
Goffman 1961/1968; Arthur, Hall & Lawrence 1989;
Collin & Young 2000; Brown & Associates 2002; Gunz
& Peiperl 2007). Career coaches should be familiar
with the key contributions to this literature and
able to recognise significant debates within it. For
example, debates concerning the role of work within
career development and contrasting perspectives on
life course development. They should recognise that
disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology,
philosophy, organisational studies, psychoanalysis,
literary studies and creative studies have all got
something to contribute to a fuller understanding of
career and that any one discipline is unlikely to enjoy
a monopoly on the ‘truth’. Career coaches should
be familiar with common claims made in relation to
career within academic circles and the popular media.
They should be able to understand the epistemological
basis of such claims and arrive at a satisfactory
position in relation to their own practice. They should
be able to critically evaluate these claims and enable
their clients to do so in congenial ways.
March 2013, Issue 30
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Articles
Creating career coaching
Career literacy
Career coaches should also be skilled at reading and
interpreting their own career development and the
career development of their clients. This demands a
very specific way of using career development theories
to engage in multiple readings of career (Mignot 2004;
Reynolds, in press). This career literacy can be enabled
by developing familiarity with key concepts derived
from career development theories to enhance the
vocabulary one uses to understand and discuss
career development. Thus equipped, the career coach
is able to understand both surface and below-thesurface narratives of career. This entails using career
development theories, not as a distancing mechanism,
but to understand people more deeply, more fully
and more wholly. One of the central benefits of using
career development theories in this way is to get a
better feel for one’s own career beliefs and those
of the client. There is a consensus in contemporary
career development thinking that an understanding
of personal career theories is fundamental to growth
and further learning for coaches and clients alike
(e.g. Krumboltz 1996; Holland 1997: 205-6; Patton &
McMahon 1998: 167-8; Law 1999; Miller-Tiedeman
1999; McCash 2006; Frigerio 2010). A high level of
career literacy, therefore, drawing from a range of
career development theories, represents part of the
distinctive and specialist knowledge base of the career
coach.
Contracting
Given the statements above about the activities of
career coaching and the importance of career-related
learning and career literacy, we believe that skilled
contracting is fundamental to the process. Contracting
entails all participants sharing their positions and
priorities and developing an agreed way to proceed.
It involves checking and re-contracting at appropriate
points to ensure that psychological contact is being
maintained. Contracting in career coaching should
be informed by career literacy and designed to
facilitate client career-related learning in all activities.
It is through skilled contracting, and thereby staying
close to the client, that one learns what the client is
learning. Contracting should inform a wider range of
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support activities around career coaching including the
marketing and management of the service. It is more
important than any particular interview structure
and provides a means of modelling ethical career
behaviour. In organisational settings, careful contracting
is required to ensure ethical practice in terms of
confidentiality and impartiality and to develop services
informed by an understanding of career-related
learning, career literacy and opportunity systems.
Meaning and purpose
We conceptualise career as life-wide and life-long
and believe that career coaching is concerned with
questions of how clients construct meaning and
purpose in their lives (Bloch & Richmond 1997). This
may be expressed as calling, whether referring to
theistic notions of a higher power or a wider spiritual
understanding of destiny and values. We should be
skilled at helping people engage with these issues
and encourage clients to explore these aspects of life
satisfaction, commitment and motivation. This means
working from a standpoint of openness to the clients’
frame of reference and exploring internal solutions to
the problems they identify in their meaning-making.
Opportunity systems
Career coaching is nested in and shaped by a series
of discourses concerning opportunity systems (e.g.
the employability and skills discourses). We believe
that the mainstream coaching literature (e.g. Palmer &
Whybrow 2007; Cox, Bachkirova & Clutterbuck 2010)
has to an extent neglected these dimensions of career
development. Understanding opportunity systems
and the discourses involved are key competences
within career coaching. Through this, coaches can help
themselves and their clients understand, interpret
and plan responses. This does not mean engaging
in didactic or directive practice. It may involve, for
example, helping clients to identify, evaluate and make
responses to labour market intelligence. For the career
coach, this represent a move away from parroting
labour market ‘messages’ towards facilitating the
client’s own research and decision-making.
Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling
Gill Frigerio and Phil McCash
Some career guidance, career education and career
coaching traditions have been bedevilled by the
simplistic application of theory to practice and the
uncritical use of models, tools and techniques. We
believe that career coaching entails the integration of
theory and practice rather than the application of
theory to practice. This involves rejecting an objectivist
distinction between theory and practice. Career
coaches should be able to creatively design and agree
their own models of action and enable their clients to
do the same.
Concluding remarks
These general statements paint a broad picture of
the landscape within which we see career coaching
operating. We fully expect career coaching will
continue to develop in several directions and the
breadth and strength of professional interest is
evidenced by the range of papers submitted to this
edition of the journal. We offer the statements above
to the wider community for consideration and to
stimulate collaborative exploration of this emerging
and exciting terrain.
References
Articles
Creative integration of
theory and practice
Arthur, M.B., Hall, D.T. & Lawrence, B.S. (Eds.) (1989)
Handbook of career theory, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Becker, H.S. (1963/1966) Outsiders: studies in the
sociology of deviance, New York, NY: Free Press.
Bloch, D.P. & Richmond, L.J. (Eds.) (1997) Connections
between spirit & work in career development, Palo Alto,
CA: Davies-Black.
Brown, D. & Associates (Eds.) (2002) Career choice and
development (4th edition), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Collin, A. & Young, R.A. (Eds.) (2000) The future of
career, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cox, E., Bachkirova, T. & Clutterbuck, D. (Eds.) (2010)
The complete handbook of coaching, London: Sage.
Frigerio, G. (2010) Reinventing careers: creating space
for students to get a life, Journal of the national institute
for career education and counselling, 26: 9-14.
Goffman, E. (1961/1968) Asylums: essays on the social
situation of mental patients and other inmates, London:
Penguin.
Gunz, H. & Peiperl, M. (Eds.) (2007) Handbook of career
studies, Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Holland, J.L. (1997) Making vocational choices: a theory
of vocational personalities and work environments
(3rd edition), Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment
Resources.
Hughes, E.C. (1937/1958) Institutional office and the
person, in E.C. Hughes, Men and their work, London:
Collier-Macmillan.
Krumboltz, J.D. (1996) A learning theory of career
counseling, in M.L. Savickas & W.B. Walsh (Eds.),
Handbook of career counseling theory and practice, Palo
Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Law, B. (1999) Career-learning space: new-DOTS
thinking for careers education, British journal of guidance
and counselling, 27 (1): 35-54.
March 2013, Issue 30
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Articles
Creating career coaching
McCash, P. (2006) We’re all career researchers now:
breaking open career education and DOTS, British
journal of guidance and counselling, 34 (4): 429-49.
Mignot, P. (2004) Metaphor and ‘career’, Journal of
vocational behavior, 64: 455-469.
Miller-Tiedeman, A. (1999) Learning, practicing and
living the new careering, Philadelphia, PA: Accelerated
Development.
Oxford English Dictionary (2002) Oxford English
Dictionary CD-ROM version 3.0 (2nd edition), Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Palmer, S. & Whybrow, A. (Eds.) (2007) Handbook of
coaching psychology, London: Routledge.
Patton, W. & McMahon, M. (1998) Career development
and systems theory: a new relationship, Pacific Grove, CA:
Brooks/Cole.
Reynolds, C. (in press) On becoming a career critic,
unpublished MA dissertation, University of Warwick.
Shaw, C.R. (1930/1966) The jack-roller: a delinquent boy’s
own story, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Weber, M. (1908/1970) A research strategy for the
study of occupational careers and mobility patterns
(Transl. D. Hytch), in J.E.T. Eldridge (Ed.), Max Weber: the
interpretation of social reality, London: Michael Joseph.
For correspondence
Gill Frigerio
g.frigerio@warwick.ac.uk
Phil McCash
p.t.mccash@warwick.ac.uk
Joint Course Directors: MA in Career Development
and Coaching Studies
Career Studies Unit
Centre for Lifelong Learning
University of Warwick
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Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling